Rachel

“There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin